Is your brand an integral part of your social media strategy? If not, you’re missing an important marketing opportunity. Through the effective use of social media, you can humanize your brand and increase its power
As a marketer, building your brand is an integral element of developing your business. The fact that many speakers at the BlogWorld & New Media Expo, including Amy Porterfield, Ric Dragon and Dino Dogan, consistently mentioned branding as a core element of social media strength reflects that many practitioners overlook this critical opportunity.
To integrate your brand into your social media efforts, here are five tactics to cultivate your brand and expand its reach.
- Give your brand a human voice (or other sounds) on social media. Nothing humanizes a brand more than how it sounds. Corporate-speak is nothing related to how real people speak. Therefore consider your brand’s language, accent and other audio noises. At a minimum, sound like a person! (Here’s a full set of tips to help you with branding on social media platforms.)
- Enhance the visual signals associated with your brand. Include the range of elements that contribute to a brand such as colors, logo, images, icons, typography and photographs.
- Tell your brand’s story. Brands aren’t a collection of facts. They’re about the stories of the company, employees and customers told in a human voice. Make your brand more real and give it personality to your prospects, customers and fans by telling your organization’s story. To aid memorability include a beginning, middle and end.
- Develop and incorporate a culture into your brand. Having a unique culture is important on social media networks because it supports community building. Think in terms of creating a special language, titles, actions and other attributes you can create to set your brand apart from your competitors. This is important because it expands the reasons people want to associate with your brand.
- Select a brand ambassador as well as branding your employees. You need a person to represent your brand on social media platforms since no one wants to hang out with a logo. The real-life “Mad Men”-like Leo Burnett created brand mascots like Tony the Tiger. By contrast social media requires a level of transparency. As a result, brands need real people to represent their firm on various social media networks to provide a human face with a name to build trust since people know who you are. Don’t overlook real life interactions. This applies to your in-store and customer service engagement. Think branded attire. Remember, you need to create a good first impression.
While many marketers consider the branding basics in their social media plans, they often overlook the ways that social media can strengthen and enhance their brand in ways beyond the logo, colors and placement. Social media’s human, transparent approach to engaging with participants extends brands in new ways that astute marketers can leverage to their advantage.
What other ways can social media enhance your brand, and what examples would you point to?
This post is by Heidi Cohen, president of Riverside Marketing Strategies and chief content officer of HeidiCohen.com.